Why a Yankee Has a Right to an Opinion

It's true.

I wasn't born here in Georgia.  I've only lived here 39 years, and that's not long enough to be considered a native.  Not if you were born and raised someplace else, like I was.

I suppose if I had blended my culture and opinions closer to the dominant viewpoints and attitudes expressed here, no one would even notice that I'm not a native born Georgian/Southerner.  I like grits, sausage biscuits, NASCAR, southern folk music, and other elements of southern culture.  But I'm not there where it counts.  I don't hunt and fish (although, I must say in fairness, there were as many or more hunters/fishers where I grew up in Michigan as there are here), I don't vote for the current crop of right wing extremists, and I don't support the display of the Confederate flag, or the glorification of the Confederacy in general.

I went through this in 2002, when I had a letter to the editor in the Waycross paper, acknowledging my support of Barnes for Governor (whom I did not end up voting for, but that is another column for another day), and my opinion that the Confederate flag should not be a part of the Georgia state flag.  The publisher, charming man that he is, ran it under the headline YANKEE SUPPORTS BARNES.

I went through this again when the attack on the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, awoke the consciousness of even some conservatives, realizing the pain the symbols caused.  I thought we had turned a corner.  But the backlash grew fierce, leading to the eventual election of an openly racist and hateful President. Once again, any opinions I had were dismissed because I wasn't born a Southerner.

And now we have the alt-right (Confederate sympathizers, Neo-Nazis, white supremacists), in open hostility, intimidation and violence-provoking behavior, that led to the death of Heather Heyer, ostensibly gathered to protest Charlottesville's decision to take down a Confederate monument.  Once again, I find I have no right to an opinion on Confederate symbols and monuments.

I have thought long and hard about it, over many years, and here is what I've decided -

I'm an American.  My Southern friends are also Americans. As fellow Americans, we have a right to have an opinion about American issues.  And whether or not to display symbols of a Confederacy that rebelled and betrayed the United States of America, and whose primary purpose was to promote and preserve the institution of slavery, should be an issue we can all discuss, regardless of what part of the ONE nation we belong to we came from.  Southerners should be no more invested in nostalgia for the Confederacy than Germans should be invested in fond memories of the Nazis.

As far as the Confederate flag, no state or public entity should endorse or display any version of it. As far as private citizens - have at it, hoss.  But to me and many others you're not displaying southern heritage, you're displaying an attachment to open racism.

As far as Confederate monuments, that should be up to each jurisdiction.  If Charlottesville,  through it's publicly elected representatives should decide to take their Confederate Memorial down, then more power to them.  Outsiders should not come in and agitate either way.

We recently took a trip to Vancouver, and did several walking tours.  The tour guides were brutally honest about the city's checkered past and racial and economic issues.  They were clear about the different monuments, buildings, and other symbols we saw, their history and their meaning.

I have no problem, if an area decides to keep up those symbols, as long as they are historically clear about what they are, both negative and positive aspects.

I lived for several years in a home that was within sight range of Stone Mountain.  Yeah, that's a big 'ol nasty monument to Civil War Generals.  Maybe it should be taken down or altered.  But another idea, which I think has been gradually happening, is to counter-balance it with what the Confederacy really did and represented, and with a full history of Georgia, including its struggle for all to receive their basic civil rights, the continuing effort to bring equality to all.

Show what slavery was really like, in all its horrors and brutality.  Show that there were brave abolitionists and freedom fighters, even in the South.  Show those who built and supported the Underground Railroad.  Show those who fought Jim Crow.  Show those who led the Civil Rights battles of the 50s and 60s.  And show those today who fight the current efforts to suppress votes, increase the prison population, turn our minority areas into colonies with less rights and dignity, re- segregate our schools, and demonize our immigration population.

The history of the South is much more than the Confederacy.  The history of the South is also a history of a Progressive struggle to make the Southland  a place of equality and dignity.

Go ahead.  Tell the story of the Confederacy.  But don't glorify it.  Tell it in the context of the true promise of the South, one that Southerners are still struggling to achieve.  And that includes those who were fortunate enough to be born here, and those who have adopted it.